Goblin Bound: The First of Many

Chapter 2: Goblins?

The last thing he remembered before all went dark was a pleasurably floating feeling where his entire body seemed to be immersed in water…weightless. Alongside that wonderful feeling was the constant throbbing pain that somehow transcended the confines of his head and pulsed all over his body in an uncomfortable ripple of pain.

He couldn’t help but furrow his eyebrows from the discomfort, the pain erupting in random spots on his…body. He could hardly feel his body for several moments, like trying to sense one’s body from a dream.

The thought flashed through his head in a moment of enlightenment… his body seemed to be…moving. He clearly remembered crashing on his bed so why was his body moving and hitting several…bumps. Apparently the source of the current pain was his body colliding with several seemingly sharp spikes as it moved.

Alarmed and annoyed, he tried to force his eyes, which now felt unusually heavy, open but failed. His eyelids twitched with his continued effort and soon his persistence was rewarded as his lids finally responded and slowly fluttered open.

At first he thought he merely imagined the whole thing as all he could see was just black, but after blinking a few times and ascertaining he wasn’t dreaming this up he began to slightly panic thinking he’d turned blind. His fears were soon allayed as his eyes, though blurry, began to pick up on dark rocky structures.

Blinking a couple more times, a rocky ceiling that was slowly moving by cleared in his field of vision accompanied by slowly moving bubbles of dim light. A scene vastly different from the ceiling of his room he’d memorized by heart.

A groan escaped his throat as his body, which felt distant and heavy as lead all this while, finally responded to being moved. He felt a sharp pain in his right side which caused him to unconsciously send out his fingers to probe only to feel them wet and sticky.

*Ugh!* *Ouch!*

He groaned once more as his head brushed against a rock, nearly bruising his head. Like an outdated computer that took its precious time booting, he became aware of the unwilling movement of his body.

He craned his neck, against the numerous protest of his aching body, to gaze ahead and figure out what was going on…he was shocked to say the least.

A hulking over six foot tall…man was dragging him by one leg against the rough ground to who knows where and in a far from gentle manner…like a person dragging a sack of trash.

He tried to speak, maybe grab ‘his’ attention, but he could only choke as his mouth bubbled with a bitter liquid of some sort. And in this fashion he was dragged for minutes upon minutes on end, his body unceremoniously colliding against several rough protrusions.

His mind churned endlessly trying to figure out exactly how he ended up here from his comfy bedroom, but as his vision began to clear, his pondering and shock gave way to horror.

The huge bulky, way over six foot creature he once thought a man turned out to be a terrifying green-skinned monster with visibly long ears. Fear gripped his heart as a name popped out his head from nowhere - Goblin captain. He couldn’t say how he knew the name but his body responded quite strongly with fear in response.

Accompanying the huge goblin captain were several smaller ugly green-skinned creatures barely over four foot tall - goblins, their name popped up in his head once more.

Terrified and confused by the near dozen green-skinned creatures ‘escorting’ him to some unknown area, he decided to keep quiet for the rest of the ‘trip’. Silently enduring the pain from the several rough bumps, he closed his eyes for a brief moment to assess his body’s state.

Aside his left leg that was held in a tight vice-like grip by the raid-leader, the rest of him freely bumped across the ground, sporting several wounds that definitely couldn’t have come from bruising against rocks. It looked like he’d come up badly beaten from some previous encounter. He was having a hard time wrapping his head around his current situation and his heart which was aggressively palpitating in terror was not helping.

He was no stranger to several novel concepts that involved transmigration, reincarnation or regression and with a few speculations, and he could only come to the conclusion he’d either transmigrated into another body or he was summoned from his own world to this one… or even more crazy was this was still earth, some version of it at least…maybe he got abducted by unhinged cosplayers with a penchant for committing felony.

There were a few flaws with his theories, the most troubling being he’d have to have died in his own world or at least in a serious coma to transmigrate - He felt even more unlucky to have possibly died from a damn migraine- and being summoned from billions of people seemed highly unlucky. It felt even more unlikely he was still on earth and was merely kidn*pped by a bunch of psychotic cosplayers or alien entities on earth.

He quickly shook his head, an action he swiftly regretted from the several feedback of pain he received, and organized his thoughts. Regardless of what happened or what explanation he could come up with, none of it would matter if he didn’t make it out of this alive.

He focused once more on his body, noticing to his delight that several of the minor bruises were beginning to hurt less and the painful gash in his right side, probably from a sharp rock, was also beginning to fade to a dull ache, albeit slowly.

He didn’t want to think about how that was possible but he was beginning to lean towards one of his theories.

Deciding to bide his time, he didn’t offer any resistance to being treated like a ‘sack of trash’. The goblin party probably thought him dead as none of them even bothered to pay any attention to him. They yelled in annoying voices to themselves in a pitch that seemed to spark up a migraine.

He calmly crafted several plans in his head, mostly ludicrous ones like suddenly forcing himself up, kicking away all the minor goblins and slaying the captain with pure strength. These ideas were merely seeking death but they strangely helped him to calm down, his now sharp mind keenly watching out for a moment to either escape, cause some confusion or simply stay alive.

If what he read about goblins from the several fantasy novels were true, then his prospects were looking bleaker by the second. He theorized the captain thought him dead and was probably dragging him off to some food storage where he might have a measure of chance to escape, or he was merely dragging him off to his cave where he could rip him limb from limb and feast on his bones like crackers.

He soon got his answer. After being dragged across several cells - that reeked with the stench of blood and excrement - and several twist and turns, the goblin party stopped before a cell seemingly larger than the rest judging from the big rickety gate.

The regular-sized goblins hurried to open the gate, prompted by an impatient grunt from the captain. The captain heaved and unceremoniously tossed - borderline smashed - him into the cell without even sparing him a glance.